Performing the Self in the Mainstream: Norwegian girls in blogging

Blogging has become an integral part of Norwegian girls’ media culture (Fuglerud 2013), despite its rather limited diffusion among the Norwegian population as a whole. 53 per cent of Norwegian girls aged 15–16 visit, author or comment on blogs (Norwegian Media Authority 2016) and some blogs authored by young women have massive audiences. Top bloggers are celebrities, framed as role models for girls. Rysst & Roos (2014) have observed that top blogs are a source of the body-image pressure experienced by Norwegian girls. Research on blogging is thus important in order to gain some insight into girls’ experiences of participation in the current mainstream media culture.

This article brings the literature on self-presentation online into conversation with the literature on girls’ and young women’s femininity and sexuality online by addressing the following research question:

How do girls who blog in the mainstream blogging community in Norway perform blogging selves over time?

This investigation is longitudinal and emphasizes girls’ perspectives on participation in mainstream blogging, which allows insight to their experiences of performing blogging selves over time rarely addressed the literature. The goal is to acknowledge, document and theorize girls’ experiences and changing perspectives.

I define mainstream blogging in Norway as encompassing both the blogg.no community, which is the largest, and the blogging genre viewed as most typical for young female bloggers (Fuglerud 2013): personal blogs including life updates and so-called outfit photos.

These photos present the blogger in various outfits and sometimes include information about the place of purchase (Palmgren 2010).

Nordic countries rank favourably in international gender-equality statistics. This relates to “several decades of women’s movement activism and welfare state intervention, targeting women’s participation in the public sphere of employment and politics and change in the traditional, gendered division of domestic work” (Sümer et al. 2014). Like their Anglo-American peers, Norwegian girls are subject to body-image pressure (Jávo 2012, cited in Rysst & Roos 2014), eating disorders, and body-hatred resulting from the increasing focus on the body characteristic of neoliberal postfeminist sensibility (Rysst 2010). Nordic Girlhood is unique because it leans on discourses that emphasize “innate likeness of girls and boys” and gender integration and frame gender differences as resulting from socialization (Formark & Bränström Öhman 2013: 4). This produces a normative ideal of a strong, independent girl who can and should do whatever she wants and downplays the potential hindrances due to structural dimensions of gender (ibid.). Norwegian girls today, especially from the middle class,

I acknowledge the class dimensions in Nielsen’s (2014) analysis but I do not address them in this article.

Though I document Norwegian girls’ performances of selves in the online-based mainstream blogging community, I have striven to analyse these performances as integral to their offline experiences framed by the wider cultural context and gendered discourses. I view mainstream blogging as illustrative of the postfeminist sensibility (Gill 2007) in that femininity norms promoted by top female bloggers focus on consumerism, the technology-enabled body (Jackson 2016), and hetero-normative sexuality that seems to originate in what Abidin & Thompson (2012) call “refracted (fe)male gaze”, whereby women “monitor and discipline each others’ bodies on the basis of presumed heterosexual masculine desires” (468). This article does not investigate top blogs,

I define top female bloggers as those listed at top positions of the Norwegian blogging rankings over a longer time, with stable audiences counting up to tens of thousands of readers per day.

I position mainstream blogging as illustrative of three recent trends in youths’ digital media culture: the competition for positive responses within the judgement culture (Hirdman 2007), because girls continually perform selves online and the audience judges these performances; celebrity culture (boyd 2008), because high-ranking female bloggers become celebrities; and increasing commercialization of children’s and teen’s media culture (Schor 2004), because some bloggers receive products or money from advertising.

Moreover, I conceptualize the term “pink blogger” as an identity label (Moje & Luke 2009), which represents a gendered discourse that positions girls’ participation in mainstream blogging in mostly negative ways. On the basis of my critical discourse analysis of Norwegian press articles (Dmitrow-Devold 2013), I argue that this label reflects the disparagement of feminized media genres that media studies (Gray 1992, Herring et al. 2004) have documented: it positions mainstream female bloggers as homogenously superficial. “Pink bloggers” originally denoted teenage girls who blog about personal life and style. They were positioned as unworthy of public attention and wasting their voices on trivialities. Historically, women’s public visibility in Norway has been largely connected to the second-wave feminist movements that initiated and pushed forward the fight for social gender equality. In this light, an engagement in the public sphere based on the accounts of teenage life and style seems misguided and incompatible with the normative ideal of Nordic Girlhood (Formark & Bränström Öhman 2013). At present, the “pink blogger” label is mostly associated with top female bloggers in their twenties who blog for a living and conveys additional connotations of the commodification of personal communication and of promoting unrealistic body ideals. The changing connotations mirror the gradual shift in mainstream blogging towards professionalization and commercialization, including the problematic aspects.

People tend to portray themselves online according to the same categories that exist offline, such as gender or race (e.g., Nakamura 2002, Robinson 2007), rather than constructing alternative identities unconstrained by one’s life or body (e.g., Turkle 1995). Still, we can filter ourselves online (Rettberg 2014), either literally, by using photo filters or Photoshop, or culturally, by hiding aspects of self which diverge from community norms and from what we want to show the anticipated audience. The performance of self also depends on the degree of anonymity in a particular online setting, its purpose and structure (Marwick 2014), and its norms of behaviour – hence a variety of girls’ self-presentations documented previously (Sveningsson Elm 2007).

Today, girls’ performances online are contextualized by postfeminist popular culture, which frames bold hetero-normative sexuality and the focus on the technology-enabled body (Jackson 2016) as individual empowerment (McRobbie 2009, Gill 2007). Stern (2004) proposes that online spaces enable adolescents to experiment with self-presentation styles more freely than offline spaces, where social constraints are stronger. Some scholars (Kelly et al. 2006, Daneback 2006, Willem et al. 2012) point to showing more skin, adopting traditionally masculine sexual scripts or playing with conventional codes of gender display as instances of such experimentation. Still, normative femininity requires girls to balance physical attractiveness with respectability (Ambjörnsson 2004). While young women transgress the traditional gender roles by, say, posting sexualized photos and acting raunchily online, they tend to balance these transgressions by emphasizing self-worth and autonomy (Dobson 2012).

Some studies of Nordic girls’ self-presentations online show similar balancing acts. Sveningsson Elm (2009) finds that the girls who posted revealing photos in the Swedish online community also emphasized their involvement in romantic relationships, which she interprets as the balancing between “the undesired polarities of the attractive but too available ‘whore’, on the one hand, and the unattractive, unwomanly woman, on the other” (97). Such dilemmas are also present on websites that explicitly encourage publishing sexualized photos, like the site deiligst.no (Helseth 2010), where girls (and boys) post photos of their bodies and compete for the audience’s highest score for “hotness”. Studies of these kinds of websites in Norway and Sweden (Knudsen 2007, Hirdman 2007) show that the girls’ photos are sexualized, often evoking soft-pornographic aesthetics. Helseth (2010) rightly argues that competing for the audiences’ scores by exposing one’s body is not an expression of girls’ free play with sexuality because they risk, much more than boys, being labelled as slutty or desperate if they fail to exhibit sexual availability to men in just the right way. An investigation of girls’ profiles on a Danish teen portal demonstrates that positive comments from peers are the biggest motivators for girls to post sexualized photos, because they bring popularity in this competitive setting (Gram & Richardt 2006).

These sites engage with celebrity- (boyd 2008) and judgment culture (Hirdman 2007) that originate in docu-soaps and reality-TV, where the participants compete with each other for the audience’s highest score. Lövheim’s (2011) investigation of top blogs authored by Swedish women also highlights a competitive online community, where bloggers use various techniques to enlarge their audiences, which lead to high positions on blog rankings and therewith popularity and material benefits. The blogging community investigated here is also competitive and engages with celebrity culture in that it frames girls as competitors for the highest positions in the blog rankings and the most popular bloggers gain celebrity status within and outside of this community. However, while Lövheim (2011) focuses on top bloggers in their twenties who blog for a living, I have focused on teenage girls who blog in their spare time and have smaller audiences.

While numerous studies focus specifically on girls’ self-presentations online (e.g., Sveningsson Elm 2009, Dobson 2012), most of them draw solely on the analyses of the online artefacts the girls produce and mostly lack a temporal perspective (see, however, Gram & Richardt 2006, Davis 2010). Consequently, we seldom learn about the girls’ experiences of self-presentation or how they self-present over time.

This study employs the concept of performing the blogging self, drawing on Lomborg’s blogging self (2012) and Goffman’s performed self (1959). These symbolic interactonist concepts presume that in any social interaction “some elements of our identity are highlighted, while others are toned down” (Lomborg 2012: 416). A blogging self is not fixed but is relational, situated in the interactions with the context – the blogging community – and the audience. The girls perform this character (Goffman 1959) for their audiences. While the concept of the blogging self allows for investigating girls’ performances of self situated in everyday interactions with the blogging community and the audience, I conceptualize these performances as an integral part of the girls’ offline experiences framed by the wider cultural context and gendered discourses, including the “pink blogger” label. Identity is performed in an ongoing process across the online and the offline settings (Thurlow et al. 2004).

I draw on postructuralist (Butler 1990) and relational (West & Zimmerman 1987, West & Fenstermaker 1995, Fenstermaker & West 2002) approaches to gender, rather than on Goffmanian (1976) gender display. I view girls’ blogging selves as both discursively performative, drawing on the multiple, fluid femininities emphasized by poststructuralism, and as situated in everyday social interactions constrained by gender structures that hold girls accountable for their performances of femininity. I also presume that different femininities are valued differently, with normative femininity requiring the balancing of physical attractiveness and respectability (Ambjörnsson 2004).

This study is a part of a larger project that combines ethnographic methods with dis-cursive analyses of media commentary about mainstream female bloggers, rather than an ethnography per se. The methods reflect the focus on girls’ perspectives and the theorization of the blogging self as situated and framed by both the online-based and the offline-based experiences and contexts. In line with this study’s theoretical view of the online and offline settings as intertwined in the ongoing process of performing the self, I collected data from both online (participants’ blogs) and offline sources (press articles, interviews with participants). The analyses of these different sources of data fed into each other.

The longitudinal design tracked the girls’ performances of selves and their experiences over time. The data-collection stages were: 1) interview one; 2) archiving blog posts and readers’ comments; 3) interview two carried out six months after interview one

The first four participants were interviewed for the second time about one year after interview 1.

To capture how the girls not only performed blogging selves but also how they experienced and justified these performances, I combined interviews with ethnographic content analyses (Altheide 1996) of their blogs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted face-to-face

One participant was interviewed by the phone.

The purpose of this investigation is to contribute to the theoretical development of the performing identity as self (Moje & Luke 2009) in online-based settings, rather than to provide a generalizable description of teenage female bloggers in Norway. Purposive sampling (Lincoln & Guba 1985) was used to select a strategic sample conducive for understanding and developing concepts that would provide explanations of the investigated phenomena. The size of the strategic sample was determined on the basis of theoretical saturation. The sample included 12 participants of the mainstream blogging community, as defined above: girls aged 15–17 whose blogs were part of the blogg.no community and included life accounts as well as outfit photos. For the sake of securing the longitudinal collection of blog samples,

The analyses included the first ten blog posts with accompanying comments published in three selected months: six months prior to interview 1, the month of interview 1, and the month of interview 2. The collection of blog samples did not coincide for all participants but covered a similar time span of about 12 months.

The analyses led me to identifying three strategies of performing the blogging self. I called these strategies because the girls emphasized and filtered out aspects of the blogging self according to changing goals. At the same time, the judging audiences (Hirdman 2007), the competitiveness, and the norms of polished femininity promoted by celebrity bloggers framed their performances. The strategies mirror the different ways the participants tried to respond to these norms: adjusting to the norms in the adjustment strategy; both adjusting to the norms and presenting potentially deviating aspects of self in the fit-in-and-be-myself strategy; and contesting these norms in the contestation strategy.

These strategies are refined, analytical products derived from the empirical material. Some girls reflected them to varying degrees. Some used different strategies over time. Instead of relating the stories of all participants, I present the essential characteristics of each strategy and provide illustrative examples. Subsequently, I present the dynamics of performances of blogging self across time and contexts focusing on several participants. While this format reduces the thickness of the presented analyses, it makes for a clear understanding of the concepts that provide explanations of the investigated phenomena.

On the basis of the empirical analyses of the interviews with teenage girls and their blogs, I have identified that the girls performed blogging selves reflexively and strategically but they were held accountable according to the gendered norms and discourses manifested both within the online-based blogging community and beyond – in the offline settings. The blogging selves changed over time and the girls identified with them to different degrees.

On the one hand, the online-based interactions with the girls who read the blogs shape the blogging selves. This judging audience (Hirdman 2007) evaluates the bloggers according to the norms of the postfeminist perfectibility (McRobbie 2000) and of respectability (Ambjörnsson 2004). On the other hand, the offline-based interactions with their schoolmates and the trivializing label of “pink blogger” also frame the girls’ performances. Public engagement based on life accounts and the stereotypically feminine area of style seems incompatible with the normative ideal of a gender-equal Nordic Girl granted with endless possibilities (Formark & Bränström Öhman 2013). Whereas some have argued that girls are freer to experiment with femininity in online settings compared with the offline settings, this investigation concludes that the girls’ performances of self are complex balancing acts disciplined according to the normative ideals of the postfeminist body and the ideals of Nordic Girlhood.

Still, while most previous studies emphasize the importance of striking a balance between sexually available and respectable femininity, in this investigation the dimensions of the looks and the brains came across as essential. The dimension of the looks relates, of course, to sexuality: the girls wanted to display attractive bodies that match the current ideals of feminine beauty. Still, those who enhanced their photos talked about the right body shape (slim but toned) and fashionable outfits and avoided posting photos that could be viewed as sexualized. Or, maybe they did not want to say they wanted to look sexy when talking to me? After all, research interviews were also social interactions, where we performed particular selves to create the desired impressions (Goffman 1959). I have not registered using fashion and style in the spirit of third-wave feminism as “a recognition of femininity as a constructive force to be used against patriarchy ‘from within’” (Sundén & Sveningsson Elm 2007: 8). Instead, in the adjustment strategy, the girls distanced themselves from blogging selves that emphasized the looks and style because they clashed with their self-perception as being smart and opinionated off the blog, even though they felt they were being misjudged. The fit-in-and-be-myself strategy involved the attempts to combine “girl stuff” with “social dilemmas” the girls felt they “should” blog about in just the right proportions. In turn, the contestation strategy that emphasized the brains was accompanied by the feeling of acting “unwomanly” (Sveningsson Elm 2009) owing to the incompliance with the normative body ideals.

It is possible that the looks and the brains dimensions were important because of the social positioning of mainstream female bloggers in Norway as superficial “pink bloggers”. The girls might have responded to this label by insisting that they were not superficial, but have opinions and are “interested in what’s going on in the world”. However, the looks and the brains dimensions might also be indications of requirements towards contemporary Norwegian girls formulated by Nielsen (2014): both pretty and smart. The girls experienced self-presentations dominating in mainstream blogging as polished and body-focused, but they responded to them differently: trying either to comply with or to subvert them. The more polished, easily consumable (Marwick & boyd 2011) and body-focused blogging selves they performed, the less they identified with them.

Finally, whereas earlier studies propose that young people tend to create identity online consistent with identity offline (Huffaker & Calvert 2005, Davis 2010), my results also indicate a reversal. Some participants seemed to perform their blogging selves not only in the online settings, but also offline, during face-to-face interactions with their readers and people who got to know them as bloggers. This expands Lomborg’s (2012) concept of the blogging self in that this self can be accomplished not only online but also offline. In broader terms, this finding contributes to the theorization of performing identity as self by documenting not only that people take performances of self originating in the offline-based contexts to the online-based contexts, but also that they can keep in their online-based characters during offline-based interactions.